Home an invitation to contemplation

Grand old-world home offers sky-high library, coffered ceilings

Whatever you do, don't call it orange. The walls in the dining room are draped in warm burnt sienna.

Photograph by: Ed Kaiser
, Edmonton Journal

At the moment, I'm lounging in a traditional wingback chair in a lavish sitting room, next to a crackling wood fire, surrounded by fine art and elegant furnishings.

I'm soaking up the character of the place and the way it makes me feel. Relaxed. Damn near spiritual, I'd say.

Then Jennifer Annesley and Neil Zinger suggest we tour the rest of their house. Really? I have to get up?

Sigh, OK. The rest of their house, fortunately, is just as mystical - saturated with the artistry, sensuality and fine craftsmanship of the owners themselves.

The story behind all this beauty was writ in Neil and Jennifer's toil, sweat and callus. All this serene elegance - this live-in art piece - is a labour of love.

After buying the Old Strath-cona-area home in the late 1990s, Neil and Jennifer lifted it off its moorings and parked it in the backyard.

While the 100-year-old home's foundation was being rebuilt, the couple stripped the centenarian to its bones and began the restoration. Some of its original stuff was retained and refinished, including the interior doors and hardwood floors.

Note: The floors not only look fabulous, but sound like old hardwood should sound, with authentic, telltale creaks.

Along the way, the pair added scores, if not hundreds of fine details, from faux-finish paint to antiqued wallpaper, to lamps and doorknobs that fit their image of a beautiful, old-world, modern home.

Neil is a custom home builder. Before that he was a photographer. So his eye and his touch are refined and creative.

Jennifer is a professional artist, whose works are highly sought after. Her paintings and drawings - the majority, European architecture, Canadian landscapes or still life - are dramatic and sensual, much like the artist herself.

The two share a bygone es-thetic of beauty and grandeur in decor, furnishings, design and fashion. Certain just-right pieces were bought and shipped back from places like Spain and Prague.

The art hanging on the walls is Jennifer's. No surprise, since the house doubles as Annesley Studio.

Mind you, it also triples as the home office of 1912 Studio, Neil's custom-home business.

When I first met Jennifer, at a downtown art show, she was rocking a corset. That is not unusual, she says. She makes them herself, along with her vintage-style black dresses, a wardrobe staple. Sort of upscale Goth.

Jennifer says her personal style and esthetic tastes are for dramatic, elegant and sensual things.

Given that, perhaps I shouldn't have described the paint colour in the dining room as "orange."

I swear Jennifer paled at the word "orange."

"I saw it as the colour of Drambuie," says Jennifer, who then describes it as burnt sienna. Oops. My bad.

The non-orange dining room also features small lion heads inlaid in the decorative moulding - or frieze - near the ceiling. The table is grand and stately. The room suggests foie gras more than it suggests frozen pizza.

It is a winter night, making it difficult to see the backyard. Much work went into it, too, to give it the feel of a courtyard with central fountain. Even the garage, adorned as it is with mirrored French doors, is uplifted to more elegant stature.

The downstairs, which I don't visit, is utilitarian, I'm told. It holds Neil's office, a fitness area, space for visitors and a wine cellar.

The main floor's seating area - where I started, in the wingback chair - opens to the dining room, which opens to the "French château kitchen" with its coffered ceiling, vintage tin cornice and soapstone countertops.

Vintage lamps were bought in New Orleans; the door came from a 1912 home in Winnipeg.

This old house was originally built as a residence for Robertson College, with 13 bedrooms and one bathroom.

While that character was retained, secreted behind walls and under floors is all the electrical, plumbing, heating and insulation of a modern home.

We creak down a hall and up the stairs to the second floor, with its master bedroom, bathroom and laundry room. The latter doubles as Jennifer's sewing room.

Then we reach one of the most amazing rooms of my memory - Jennifer's studio, with its ceiling opened up to the attic.

The high space is rimmed with bookshelves and a banister upon which rests a sliding ladder to move between shelves. It's as if a historic library was set above Jennifer's studio, its work space and formal seating area.

Even the window is perfect. It faces north, meaning the natural light is muted and even - perfect for painting, I'm told.

"I spend a lot of hours in here," says Jennifer.

I would spend a lot of hours here, too - when I wasn't sitting in the wingback chair in the sitting room, next to the roaring fire.

I continue to gape at the ceiling as the two talk about some of the other fine details in the home. Many of them are best left to photographs. My orange-tainted vocabulary fails this house badly.

Neil sees me looking up at the high library. He explains that he actually jacked up the roof to accomplish this feat of grand design.

The result is at once romantic and practical, he says.

And I think: Just like the owners.

Scott can be reached at Scott@ ScottMcKeen.ca for comments or suggestions for future features on unique or beautiful homes in the Edmonton region